Tag Archives: player

Did a browser plugin/add-on ever make you switch your browser of choice? Well, for me one did and it’s ExtensionFM, build by Dan Kantor and Charles Smith, based out of NYC.

ExtensionFM is a Google Chrome extension that turns your browser become into a personal listening station, powered by your favorite music websites. How does it work? First, after installing the extension to your Chrome browser (direct install link), anytime you visit a website that hosts MP3 files, ExFM – which runs in the background – will detect the audio and index the piece of audio in your ExFM Library, creating your own personal music Library courtesy of your favorite websites you visit every day. I had the chance to use ExFM since its very early version and let me tell you that it has changed the way I discover and listen to music, not only because it works so well with Tumblr, where the people I follow have become my main source for new music. Not an audio creator myself, I’m currently listening to my SoundCloud Favorites via ExtensionFM. Whoop!

SoundCloud support is really exciting because it opens up a direct link from the artist’s studio into the listener’s music library. If we think back to when bands used to record music for ten’s of thousands of dollars in a studio, then produce millions of plastic discs, then ship those discs to thousands of stores, then have listeners spend 20 minutes trying to open the plastic surrounding those plastic discs, well anyway you get the point. Now artists can make music for the cost of a computer, upload it to SoundCloud and within seconds it’s inside their fans’ music libraries. Pretty incredible!

How does it look? Pretty cool, actually – see for yourself:

In the top right corner you’ll see that after clicking the ExFM extension icon, a player opens that has already detected the audio on the page I’m on. After clicking ‘Queue All’ I can now find the tracks in my ExFM Queue and play them in the background – closing the browser will not stop the playback.

Oh and want to see how this works for embedded players? Head over the The Recommender to check it out.

We like that, how about you? Try out ExtensionFM and let us and team ExFM know what you think in the comments.

A lot of people ask me about customizing the SoundCloud player, “I love the player but could you just add this…” or “the player doesn’t quite work with the background of my blog, is there a way to tweak it”. Well actually there are quite a lot of options so I thought I’d summarize a few of them here.

Hopefully you should all know by now, but SoundCloud currently has three really great players that can be customized in a number of ways. There is the mini, waveform and artwork player. Each can be used to great effect in different scenarios. And there are several standard customizations you can do with each. Please note, to access the mini and artwork players you’ll need a premium account.

As well as the standard player customizations there are a number of other ways that you can hack the SoundCloud player. You just need to know where to look in the embed code. There are a range of different parameters that you can change in the embed code when you share a player:

Facebook is making some major changes to the way applications work on profiles and pages so we had to update our own application to meet the new (and ongoing) requirements. In short, Facebook is moving all in-page apps (aka boxes) to the tabs section of personal profiles and fan pages which means that you’ll need to update your SoundCloud Player and Dropbox apps.

Here’s how it works:

1. Find the SoundCloud Player App, search for the artist name and select the artist/track you’d like to add. You’ll get the best results by adding the direct URL of the user, track, set or group you’d like to add:

2. Click ‘Save’ to add the player to the tabs section of your profile or page.

3. Go to your profile or page, ‘add a new tab’ and select ‘Tracks’ to add a proper tab. You can also move around the Tab to the spot of your choice:

That’s it, done (if you don’t see Tracks in the above box, type SoundCloud into the tab search field):

Note: Facebook will make some changes to its overall design (current ETA is late January postponed to February) and the Tracks tab will look much nicer than it does today. Also, we might add some other cool stuff to the Player app. Stay tuned.